Lusty Ladies and Gentlemen
Happy True would “buy pints because they were flat. Fifths in round bottles would have saved him a heck of a slug in money. But they were uncomfortable to sleep on.”
The intersection where Pike Street runs into First Avenue is known to some wildlife sociologists as the Crossroads of Mental Health. For decades, street crazies and druggies occupied the four corners, along with prostitutes, players, and partyers. A pint-size Scotsman named Andy Brodie, who went by the street name of “Half-Horse Half-Alligator”—it had something to do with the size of his “groinal area” he said—once aptly described the First and Pike scene: he saw a buddy in the crowd crossing the intersection, and when he shouted “Hey, asshole!” everyone in the street turned around.
Besides bars and hockshops, there were peep shows and amusement arcades lining First Avenue’s blocks from the fifties into the eighties. The arcades, recalled likeable Seattle police lieutenant Frank Ottersbach, who walked the avenue beat in the fifties and sixties, featured dirty movies in coin-operated panorama viewers. “We were instructed to raid them from time to time,” he said, and the Seattle Police Department (SPD) supplied him and others with dimes to go watch the shows and then bust the operators. The first time he watched one of the movies, Ottersbach said, “There were two girls sitting on chairs. One had underwear on—panties and a bra. The other had a housecoat on, and once in a while she let the thing flop open. You couldn’t see the whole thing—none of the garbage you see today.”
Seattle police raid an illegal peep show in 1954. (Photo: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection, MOHAI)
Joe Wenzl, a Seattle longshoreman in those days, recalled how he and others would work hard on the waterfront and play hard on the Avenue, where bartenders doubled as financial consultants. “If they were broke they’d go in and hit the bartender up for whatever their word was good for. This was our bank, our social club,” Wenzl said. “Evidently, now everybody belongs to a tennis club. I don’t think they can borrow money there.”
David Edenso, who lived in the LaSalle Apartments—Nellie Curtis’s onetime Pike Place Market whorehouse—said the neighborhood was filled with characters attracted by downtown’s vices. An old seaman named Happy True, for example, lived in a sleeping room with a two-burner hot plate and passed out on his mattress of whiskey. “He’d buy up two, three cases of pints of whiskey and line them up under his mattress,” said Edenso. “He’d buy pints because they were flat. Fifths in round bottles would have saved him a heck of a slug in money. But they were uncomfortable to sleep on.”
Included in that roster of characters was tattoo artist Danny Danzel, who learned his ink art by tattooing dogs when he was a kid. His longtime First Avenue Tattoo Shop offered up “automatic tattoo removal”: a tank of live piranhas. He practiced his art ethically—when a man asked to have a tattoo put on his face, Danny told the customer he’d likely come to regret it. So instead he drew the tattoo on with a pencil, and the man never came back. The mean streets were made a little sweeter by Backwards Louie, who walked everywhere backward. He liked to borrow money for a few drinks, but when people saw him coming, they crossed the street. So he devised an act. He always appeared to be walking away when in fact he was walking backward—pumping his knees smartly up and down like a drill team. Once a victim closed in, he’d suddenly spin about and put his hand out.
“I hate to ask,” Louie was once heard to say, “but a dollar would get me through college.”
“What college is that?”
“A cheap one.”
Other performers of downtown’s faded street show included a seventies couple, George and Pansy, Seattle’s only mother-son funeral-attending team. In tandem, they also regularly attended weddings, baby christenings, and private parties, usually uninvited and often taking photos with filmless cameras. After Pansy died, little George carried on the ritual of sitting atop Pansy’s grave on her birthday, having a picnic and watching baseball on a portable TV. They had lived in a music-filled home up on Capitol Hill, packed with twelve pianos.
The late King Olaf, meanwhile, left a vice record no one will ever break: most arrests, drunk in public, single person. In the twenty-five years records were kept, until the drunk-in-public law was repealed in the seventies, Olaf was arrested 401 times and sentenced to 10,680 days in jail—he served 7,711 of them. That comes to more than twenty years locked up. Olaf had the right attitude. “Say what you want,” he said. “I always had a place to stay.”
Once, according to a police report, an American Indian with a rope lassoed a passing First Avenue cab in Pioneer Square. It was culturally significant enough to make the New York Times.
In the seventies, there were fourteen downtown porno theaters/dirty book stores, such as the Champ Arcade and Green Parrot. There were also nine hockshops, including Myer’s Music and pawn store, where, in the fifties, Al Hendrix bought teenage son Jimi his first guitar. And squeezed in among the greasy spoons and flophouses were twenty-five taverns. Not restaurant bars, like those on upscale First Avenue today, but real taverns: the Alaska, Boulder, Oxford, Shellback, and Beaver among them. There were so many that the game was to have one beer at each pub—traveling up one side of the street from Pioneer Square to the Pike Place Market, then down the other—without passing out. A huge fellow named Tiny Freeman, who ran for the U.S. Senate from his office at the J & M Café bar, claims to have made it all the way up one side and partway down the other before losing his lunch on Union Street. In later years, he was shocked to see how many places had lost out to progress and disappeared. “The tradition of the Skid Road bar—in a town where Skid Road was invented—is in a sad state,” he said. “It’s really hard to find a place that people won’t go into anymore.” Among the joints on the endurance course was the York Lunch near First and Pike, where, fifty years after women were given the right to vote, owners were still refusing to serve females at the bar. It just wasn’t dignified for ladies to sit there, a bartender said; besides, they usually got drunk and nasty. The owners eased the policy after a couple of women set off a small bomb one morning on the York’s doorstep.
Some of First Avenue’s traditions lived on at the Lusty Lady, the fully nude dance club down the street from Pike Place Market and across from the Seattle Art Museum. The nudie joint and the highfalutin museum lived in harmony, even when the Lady’s marquee celebrated civic events, such as Seafair (“Chicks Ahoy!”), the World Trade Organization riots (“Nude World Order”), or holidays (“Happy Spanksgiving!”). Dancers performed fully nude on a stage surrounded by paying customers in a series of individual booths. They peered at the stage through windows featuring electric shades, which rose and fell depending on how much time a customer purchased by putting quarters in a coin box. Other booths featured dirty movies: high-tech panoramas. It was a business long managed by women, where thousands of quarters flowed through the coin boxes daily—a million dollar annual operation in Seattle and at a companion club in San Francisco. Strippers entertained customers they liked and those they were wary about. All were made bearable by the glass that separated them from the dancers. While they could see their “clients” masturbating, the dancers were often thinking of mundane chores they had to do after work, such as pick up milk and baby food. Most had a good sense of humor about performing nude. “You should have seen the last guy I had,” said a dancer who worked in a “private pleasures” booth. He opened his coat and he was wearing a slip, which he pulled up, exposing himself. “He’s nude from the waist down, wanking away while I dance for him, and in the middle of it he says, ‘How do you like my legs?’ I burst out laughing. Kind of ruined his mood.”
Many of the dancers were single moms or college students and had also worked at Frank Colacurcio’s strip joints. “There were grad students; there were law students working when I was there,” recalled Elisabeth Eaves, who went on to become an author and an editor at Forbes magazine. “There were a couple of real estate agents; there definitely were some moms. A trapeze artist, I think she’s still there. Some artists and writers. It was a pretty cool bunch of women.” They were typically poor, did it for the money, and weren’t particularly interested in the sex. Some had boyfriends, and almost all had followers, if not stalkers, who tried to see them outside the club. “Under no circumstances ever do that!” one said in an interview. “There may be a few nice guys. But they all turn out to be creeps.” The girls also got good advice from one of the Lady’s managers, June, who protected and educated them. Among the lessons: Don’t do pornography, no matter how desperate you are. “The live show ends with your shift,” June would say. “Video is forever.”
Thankfully, this little bit of history continued to spice up fading First Avenue even after the lowbrow Lady got caught up in the high-stakes game of downtown real estate development a few years ago. The Lady’s tacky, narrow little building at 1315 First Avenue appeared doomed when a group of heavyweight developers, including a billionaire, a wealthy venture capitalist, and a former Seattle mayor, aimed their wrecking ball at Peaches, Kitten, and Trixie. They and their nudie house, it appeared, were about to become the next victims of the condo-fornication of Seattle.
Then the inconceivable happened: in a city where rapacious new development effortlessly bulldozes fading history, someone said no to money. Christto Tolias and his family, longtime owners of the century-old, mostly vacant structure housing the peep-show theater, refused to sell the property. The family rejected an offer of “several” millions of dollars from ex-mayor Paul Schell and his fellow hotel/condo developers, including cellular magnate Bruce McCaw and investment whiz Tom Alberg. Attorney John Sinsheimer said the family’s motives to not sell were personal and financial. “They like the building. It’s a good investment with a steady income stream,” he said, “and they just wanted to keep it.” Property records list the building’s birth date as 1900 and the site’s assessed value at $2 million. In earlier days, the building was a seaman’s bar and hotel called the Seven Seas. It became one of the city’s first gay nudie theaters, the Sultan, before the Lusty Lady moved in around 1985.
After the rejection, Schell and partners in the new twenty-one-story, $120 million Four Seasons hotel and condo tower at First Avenue and Union Street had to regroup. With no other option, they made the Toliases another offer: they would buy air rights above the Lusty building. While the old joint would remain, the agreement would allow the developers to extend such aerial structures as decks and balconies overhead. The Toliases accepted. Marvelous. The big developers not only didn’t get their prized property, they paid $850,000 for thin air.
The strippers, among the last practitioners in Seattle’s once-thriving old vice district, stayed on as the neighbors who walked around in the nude. But while the club could outlast detractors and developers, it couldn’t weather the economy. In 2010 the Lady’s owners announced the strip joint was going tits up, closing its doors. Comptroller and co-owner Darrell Davis said income had dropped 60 percent in the past decade. Alas, Seattleites didn’t want to pay to see naked ladies anymore. They could get that for free at home—on their computers.
